The political conflict in America, including the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, rests in part upon a language distinction. When does a speaker or writer mean something “literally” as opposed to “figuratively?”
For a while now, defenders of the former president have encouraged us to take his words seriously, but not literally.
In an essay on this topic from 2011, I argued that “metaphors matter.”
Public speakers and writers — whether they be politicians, educators or journalists — should be held accountable for their metaphors.
The metaphor, a form of figurative language that compares one thing to another, can be virtuous or vicious. Bad metaphors express false comparisons, as when former President George W. Bush talked about a “crusade” in the Middle East against terrorists. To his credit, when alerted, he stopped using it.
Did Trump use language designed to incite violence? My answer is “yes” and “no.”
Remember when former President Bill Clinton answered a question from prosecutors with, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is?” I am no lawyer or constitutional scholar, but the question of whether Trump committed a “high crime” depends, in part, on what the meaning of “fight” is, a word that the former president used time and time again to protest the result of the election.
What is the “literal” meaning of “fight?”
We need two definitions here. First for “literal,” from the American Heritage Dictionary:
Being in accordance with, conforming to, or upholding the exact or primary meaning of a word or words.
Now we turn to the literal meaning of “fight”:
To attempt to harm or gain power over an adversary by blows or with weapons.
As you move down the layers of definitions, the meaning of fight becomes less literal, as when we want to “fight cancer” or “fight temptation.” There is no violence suggested in these usages, only vigorous opposition.
In that sense, most common uses of the word “fight,” I would argue, are figures of speech, comparisons, metaphors. I use it that way all the time: “We’ve got to fight like hell for better public schools.”
I also misuse the distinction, especially in the adverbial forms “literally” and “figuratively.” As in, “When the Buccaneers held the Chiefs without a touchdown to win the Super Bowl, my head literally exploded.” If it did, my wife would have had to call the cleaning crew.
A usage note in the American Heritage Dictionary comforts me in that I am not alone:
For more than a hundred years, critics have remarked on the incoherency of using literally in a way that suggests the exact opposite of its primary sense of ‘in a manner that accords with the literal sense of the words.’ In 1926, for example, H.W. Fowler cited the example “The 300,000 Unionists … will be literally thrown to the wolves.” The practice does not stem from a change in the meaning of literally itself — if it did, the word would long since have come to mean “virtually” or “figuratively” — but from a natural tendency to use the word as a general intensive meaning “without exaggeration,” as in They had literally no help from the government on the project, where no contrast with the figurative sense of the words is intended. The looser use of the word literally does not usually create problems, but it can lead to an inadvertently comic effect when the word is used together with an idiomatic expression that has its source in a frozen figure of speech, such as in I literally died laughing.
PolitiFact has tracked Trump’s language in the run-up to the assault on the Capitol, asking whether his words incited violence. Over and over, in tweets, at rallies, and in his speech before the insurrection, Trump uses the verb “fight.”
But, it’s true, we have all used that word without intending violence. A stronger case might be used against the president’s lawyer and hype man Rudy Giuliani, who suggested to the crowd, “Let’s have trial by combat” as the only way to overturn the election results.
I will offer an opinion here: Donald Trump did not intend his words to result in the murderous violence at the Capitol. He did not “literally” mean that his supporters should take weapons and use them against police.
But here I return to the case I made 10 years ago: We should all be held responsible for our literal language. But we must also be held accountable for our figurative language, metaphors, similes, analogies and more. And you should be held most accountable if you hold the highest office in the land.
Here is my own figurative language: That crowd of Trump supporters was a keg of dynamite. The president’s words lit the fuse. In one of the most famous statements on First Amendment freedoms and responsibilities, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in a dissenting opinion in the 1919 case of Abrams v. U.S., wrote: The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”
Whether he meant his words in a literal or figurative sense, Trump spoke, and supporters who loved him and wanted him to remain president acted in hatred and violence. He bears responsibility for that, whether he is convicted or not. I mean that literally.
